'Stepmom' of West Memphis suspects says FBI told her young Kane pulled trigger

Mourners gather Saturday at the I-40 exit ramp 275 where West Memphis policemen Sgt. Brandon Paudert and officer Bill Evans lost their lives. They were killed in the line of duty Thursday after a traffic stop of father and son Jerry R. Kane and Joseph T. Kane.

Joe Kane

A woman identifying herself as Donna Lee Wray, who lives in this Clearwater, Fla., home, said she is the common-law wife of Jerry Kane. A neighbor confirmed the presence of Joe and Jerry there over the past few months.

Trevor Aaronson/Special to The Commercial Appeal

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Less than 24 hours after the bloody West Memphis shooting that left four people dead, including two police officers, FBI agents knocked on the door of a pink Spanish-style house here near the Gulf of Mexico.

But what the FBI agents told Wray offers the first details of how the most costly day in Memphis-area law enforcement began.

"Jerry had nothing to do with it," Wray said.

She said federal agents told her Kane's 16-year-old son, Joe, was the one who gunned down West Memphis Police Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38, with an AK-47 assault rifle.

The Commercial Appeal could not verify that information independently. FBI officials declined to comment.

But federal agents here reportedly had the same question as many others have in Greater Memphis: What could have sparked the deadly shooting Thursday?

In an interview with The Commercial Appeal on Saturday, Wray tried to answer that, describing an intense bond between father and son born from heartbreak.

A lifelong Ohioan, Kane was a long-haul truck driver married to a nurse named Hope. Their first child was a son, Joe. Two years later, they had a daughter, Candy.

But six weeks after Candy's birth, Kane and his wife found her lifeless in the crib. They brought her to the hospital. The initial diagnosis: sudden infant death syndrome. But the hospital, Wray recalled from stories her husband had told her, wanted to be sure.

They insisted on an autopsy. Kane objected, only to discover he had little choice in the matter.

"He didn't want her all cut up and to have her brain weighed," Wray said. "She was gone."

That episode 14 years ago, Wray explained, inspired a distrust of government in Kane. "He just couldn't understand that," Wray said.

"How could a business have rights where the flesh and blood does not?"

As a result, Kane began to withdraw from the trappings of government.

He gave up his driver's license — and his state-sanctioned livelihood as a trucker — and became increasingly antagonistic toward law enforcement in Ohio.

Kane's son idolized him, and even as a young boy would espouse antigovernment views, as if to parrot his father. "They were like clones of each other," Wray said.

In 2004, police in Springfield, Ohio arrested Kane for shooting a 13-year-old boy with a BB gun. As the officers were detaining Kane, according to story the man and his son had told Wray, Joe, then 10 years old, attacked the officers, trying to free his father.

"They beat Joe," Wray alleged.

The bond between father and son, and their mutual abhorrence of government authority, only grew stronger around 2007, when Hope died from complications of pneumonia.

"They were the only ones they had left," Wray said. "Their wife and mother had died. Their daughter and sister had died."

By then, the national housing bubble had burst. Foreclosure rates were rising dramatically across the country. Kane, whose own house in Ohio had been foreclosed on by the bank, began to study deeds and mortgage contracts. He traveled the country advising people how to use administrative processes to stall, and potentially stop, foreclosure.

Kane charged a fee for the seminars, which varied by area, but even if people didn't have money for the fee, he'd allow them to attend.

"If you need to come to the seminar more than I need the money, then you get here," Wray recalled Kane saying frequently.

The Florida woman met Kane for the first time in February, at one of his seminars in Las Vegas. Wray, who previously operated a permanent makeup business, was in foreclosure and trying to keep the house. In Kane, she found not only a business partner but a romantic one as well.

"He's the only real man I've ever known," she said.

Their relationship was a fast-blooming one, and within weeks of meeting, Kane and his son were living in Clearwater with Wray and her two children. Joe had become increasingly protective of his father, expressing frustration to Wray about the number of times law enforcement officers had hassled or arrested his father for refusing to carry a driver's license.

"Joe was tired of seeing his dad get harassed over and over again," Wray said.

That's why Wray took Joe aside when he and his father were about to leave earlier this month to attend one of Kane's seminars. The father and son were planning to make the 2,300-mile trip from Clearwater to Las Vegas in a white minivan.

" 'Look, don't do anything irreversible,' " Wray said she told Joe. " 'I know you're upset about the harassment. If something happens, just go (to jail) and I'll get you out. Don't do anything irreversible.'

"He promised me. He swore to me that he wouldn't do anything irreversible unless something irreversible was done to him first."

Wray can't imagine yet what happened during that initial traffic stop where two West Memphis police officers were gunned down. Kane would not have killed anyone, she insisted, but she's not sure what Joe might have done if he felt his father was in danger.

"Joe wouldn't have done anything like that unless he had damn good reason," she said. "Something went past the point of no return, and he felt he had to protect his dad."

Once the two officers were dead, with Joe holding the assault rifle, Kane could have made the decision to drive away and pick up the handgun he kept in the van, joining his son in the shooting that continued later in a Walmart parking lot.

"I think when I see the video — the dash cam — I'm going to see shock and horror on Jerry's face," Wray said. "And if that was the case, he would have never turned Joe in.

"Never. Never."

Trevor Aaronson, a Florida-based freelancer, is a former CA staff member.